Exploring ideas for affordable, sustainable, enjoyable living.

Free Fitness Logs

by CheapyKeen on July 12, 2012

There are many great online resources for diet and exercise tracking. I’ve been exploring some of the free ones, and thought I’d share my reviews.

For GPS tracking of my outdoor workouts, I’ve been really happy with the CardioTrainer smartphone app. It provides real-time data on steps, speed, distance, calories burned, plots my route on a nice street map, and would apparently integrate with my in-phone music library (if I had one). I was much less impressed with the affiliated Noom application for diet tracking. It would be great for anyone who wants to characterize a meal by size (small, medium, large) and color (green for healthy, red for unhealthy, yellow for in-between), but I found that to be far too subjective to be useful.

My new favorite online food diary is myfitnesspal.com. It also has downloadable smartphone apps that work seamlessly with the main website. The database for the food diary is extensive, and it is also simple to add your own foods or quickly log calories only. The fitness tracker is equally efficient: just tell it what you did and for how long, and it calculates your calories burned. There are also handy tools, a blog, and message boards to help keep you on track. The best part, however, is the instant gratification I get when I log my exercise and it immediately increases my daily limit for food calories by the amount that I just burned. Bring on the cheesecake! 😉